Mi'kmaq Bride's Box

This decorated bentwood box is a rare form of First Nations artistry dating from the early 1800s.

It is a large (19.75” wide x 16.25 deep x 8.25” high) oval storage box known as a “Mi’kmaq bride’s box.”

Unlike Mi’kmaq quilled birch bark boxes which are relatively common, very few of these elaborately decorated oval bentwood boxes have emerged on the market or are in collections based on our research, including discussions with other knowledgeable dealers who have bought, sold and tracked them for many years.

The oval body of this box is made from a thin piece of old growth (tight-grained) ash, as is the rim around the top. Since ash is a relatively pliable wood when cut thin or steamed, it has long been favored by Northeastern Native artisans for constructing bentwood utilitarian objects, such as snowshoe frames.

Where the ends of the single bent wood splints of this box overlap they are held together at seams sewn with brass wire, a material that was also used in the construction of Native-made crooked knives of this time period.

On the oval body of the box, one seam runs down the outer edge the wood splint, and a partial seam runs about 2” in from the inner end of the splint. Note that the thin splint is tapered to an even thinner dimension on the inner end which helps maintain the tension of the oval curve that is reinforced with stitching.

The bent ash rim also has two sewn seams where the ends of the splint meet, and it also has a thinned inner end from which the second seam is set back about 2”.

The oval top and bottom pieces of the box are thicker pieces of white pine.

Pine bottom of the box with an old collection reference.

Small pegs spaced every 4”-6” hold the pine bottom to the bent ash sides of the box as seen in the center top of the photo below, and pegs also hold the bent ash top rim to the oval pine cover.

The outer surfaces of the top and sides have a thick ebony paint finish, and the interiors are unfinished.

The most notable feature of this box is the chip-carved and incised decoration on the top, which we will explore after providing some historical and cultural context for the creation of Mi’kmaq bride’s boxes.

Geographical and Historical Context

All the documented Mi’kmaq bride’s boxes have surfaced in the same region of Maritime Canada: present-day Lunenburg County on the south shore of Nova Scotia.

The land that is now Lunenburg County was once part of the vast Mi’kmaw homelands called Mi’kma’ki that encompassed all of present-day Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, most of New Brunswick, a portion of Newfoundland, and a small edge of Maine.

(image source: native-land.ca/maps/territories/mikmaq)

Europeans started arriving in Mi’kma’ki as early as 1497 (when the merchant and explorer John Cabot landed on its shores), but it wasn’t until after the 1603 arrival of Samuel de Champlain that French colonists (“Acadians”) began to create settlements in Nova Scotia.

Between 1630-1680, the Acadians established a small logging, farming and fishing community they called Mirliguèche which is now the port town of Lunenburg, the seat of Lunenburg County.

An earlier Mi'kmaq name for that same portside area (where they had always had traditional summer encampments) was āseedĭk, meaning “clam-land” (Rand, 1875).

Mi’kmaq women, children and wigwam at a summer encampment in Nova Scotia (image: courtesy of Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, reference # P113/ Jack Woolner Collection)

The small number of Mi’kmaq and European residents (less than a dozen of each were documented in 1688, and by 1745 there were only eight families, although upwards of 300 Mi’kmaw would camp there in the summer months) in what is now the town of Lunenburg, NS purportedly co-existed peacefully and intermingled through trade and marriage.

However, the Mi’kmaw became caught up in decades of military conflict between the French (with whom they sided) and the English for Nova Scotia territory.

In 1753, after the victorious British had ousted the French Catholic Acadians from Lunenburg, the new authorities settled 1,453 German, Swiss and French Protestants in the town (lunenburgns.com).

This influx of Protestant Europeans initiated new conflicts with the Mi’kmaw who raided the harbor town in 1756, but hostilities between the groups ended around 1760, and European dominance of Nova Scotia territories continued to grow.

In 1801 the Nova Scotia government allotted ten Indian reserves in the province, resulting in a vast reduction in Aboriginal home territory.

There are currently three Mi’kmaq reserves within Lunenburg County, as well as a regional office of the Native Council of Nova Scotia, the administrative authority for the large community of Mi'kmaq peoples in Nova Scotia who do not live on reserves.

This abbreviated summary of the long, complicated and sad history of interrelations between Mi’kmaq and European populations in Nova Scotia provides the background for exploring the several centuries of intermingling of these groups’ craft and artistic traditions.

Material Cultural Context and Precedence

Men within the indigenous Northeastern Woodlands tribes of the eastern United States and Atlantic Canada—the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, Penobscot and Passamaquoddy (referred to collectively as the Wabanaki or “People of the Dawnland”)—have long made bentwood boxes.

An oval Wabanaki bentwood box made in 1779, with pigmented double-curve decoration. (image: mainestatemuseum.org}

Although Wabanaki peoples may not have made bentwood boxes prior to European contact (Bourque, 2001), since contact occurred so early on the east coast of this continent, the indigenous residents have practiced the craft for centuries, producing both oval and round bentwood boxes.

This round, early Wabanaki bentwood box also has traditional double-curve designs, but they are incised rather than painted. (private collection)

While there is documentation that the Wabanaki used bentwood boxes for their own storage needs (Speck, 1970), it is likely that they also made them to sell to European settlers as they did with ash splint baskets, a form that was also possibly a European introduction that by the late 18th century the Wabanaki were making for their own use as well as for commercial trade (Bourque, 2001).

An early utilitarian Mi’kmaq bentwood box with a dark painted surface. (image: cowanauctions.com)

This round, mid-1800s Mi’kmaq bentwood box with with incised and chip-carved designs from the Herbert G. Wellington Collection was collected in Nova Scotia. (image: stairgalleries.com)

This early incised-carved Wabanaki oval bentwood box in the Heye Collection of the National Museum of the American Indian was used as a man’s toolbox (image: americanindian.si.edu)

Bending and lashing natural materials to create storage containers was of course also a pre-contact practice among the Wabanaki who made birch bark vessels in a wide variety of shapes (e.g., round and oval boxes, mocucks, bowls, shallow dishes, etc.) that were described enthusiastically and in great detail by French missionaries and English explorers (e.g., James Rosier in 1605 and John Josselyn in 1673, as quoted in Bourque, 2001) upon early contact in the 1600s.

A Mi’kmaq quill-decorated oval birch bark box (image: americanindian.si.edu)

In addition to the form of the oval bentwood Mi’kmaq bride’s box, its decoration – both the designs and the methods of creating them – also reflects Mi’kmaq aesthetic traditions.

The round and looped incised designs on the bride’s box are examples of compass work (i.e., perfect circles, half-circles and ovals created with aides such as a tack and string) which Mi’kmaq coopers and quill-decorated box makers were using at least by the early 19th century (Whitehead, 1982).

A Mi’kmaq birchbark container with quilled circle and half-circle compass-work designs. (image: americanindian.si.edu)

The bride’s box also has traditional four-petal compass-work designs, shown in the close-up image below, and also on a quilled Mi’kmaq box.

A four-petal compass-work design in quillwork on a Mi’kmaq box. (image: americanindian.si.edu)

The stylized four-petal-flowers-within-circles designs on the Mi’kmaq bride’s box also appear on other Wabanaki objects, such as on the bone game pieces shown below (donated to the American Museum of Natural History by Frank Speck) on which the designs are incised and pigmented.

An interesting variation on the four-petal flower design is incised on this 18th century Wabanaki burl bowl.

This design variation has open looped corners meeting at a central rectangle, which is similar to the central motif on the bride’s box.

It is not only the designs on the cover of the Mi’kmaq bride’s box that reflect centuries-old Wabanaki artistic traditions, but also the techniques of creating the designs—namely with incised carving and chip carving.

Creating designs with incised lines and chip carving are common on a wide variety of early Wabanaki crafts, as illustrated by the 19th century objects below from our past inventory, whether they were made for sale (e.g., the canoe model), or for personal use (e.g., the basket gauge).

While compass work was an early European folk art tradition that may have been introduced to Mi’kmaq artisans by Europeans, chip carving may have been a cultural influence that flowed from Mi’kmaq craftsmen to early European immigrants in Nova Scotia who then used the technique to create designs on furniture, accessories and fishing implements (Field, 1985).

Regardless of whose artistic traditions and techniques influenced whom, it is clear is that the woodcraft of bentwood boxes and the decorative traditions of compass-work designs, incised carving, and chip carving all came together in early Mi’kmaq brides boxes from the area that is now Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia.

This Mi’kmaq bride’s box sold at an auction in Nova Scotia in 2007. (image: antiquesandthearts.com)

The Mi’kmaq bride’s box pictured above was made in 1813, and found in Lunenburg County. The design of its chip-carved and incised decoration and the use of copper or brass wire are so similar to the details of the Mi’kmaq bride’s box that we are featuring here that they could likely have been made by the same hand.

Who Was the Bride?

We surmise that Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq bride’s boxes dating from the 1790s to the early 1800s, while made and decorated by Mi’kmaq, were not made for Mi’kmaq brides. Rather, they were likely called bride’s boxes due to their resemblance to Scandanavian and German oval bentwood boxes.

A Danish bentwood bride’s box, circa 1790 (image: 1stdibs.com)

While similar in shape and construction to Mi’kmaq bride’s boxes, the decorative techniques on European bride’s boxes were very different, as they were elaborately painted rather than incised and chip carved.

Our guess is that Mi’kmaq craftsmen made what came to be called Mi’kmaq bride’s boxes to sell or trade to the German and Swiss immigrants who settled in present-day Lunenburg County starting in 1753. Alternatively, they could have made them for their own use simply as storage boxes and they became known locally as bride’s boxes because of similarities to bride’s boxes that the European immigrants were familiar with back in their homeland.

In 18th and 19th century Germany and Scandinavia, bride’s boxes were given as a marriage gift to brides to hold small items in the bride's trousseau such as linens, lace, and ribbons (Lefco, 2004).

In contrast, documentation of early Mi’kmaq cultural traditions having to do with marriage do not come close to involving a bride being given a special box for her “trinkets” or of a Mi’kmaq bride having anything resembling a trousseau.

Rather, Mi’kmaq ceremonial marriage practices documented in great detail by French missionaries and traders (quoted in Hoffman, 1955 and Wallis & Wallis, 1955) reveal how radically different Mi’kmaq marriage traditions were from quaint European marriage customs.

If any marriage gifts were exchanged among Mi’kmaq families, they were likely to be meat and furs given by the groom to the bride’s father.

Although the ethnographic records of Mi’kmaq marriage customs were written as early as 1611, some of the important ethnographies date from 1758 which was only 50 years before the timeframe that Lunenburg County Mi’kmaq bride’s boxes were made, so it is unlikely that Mi’kmaq marriage traditions would have changed drastically between when the traditions were documented and the boxes were made.

It is also useful to think about 19th century Mi’kmaq lifestyles to realize that a bride’s box was an unlikely woman’s possession.

Mi’kmaq families practiced an itinerant lifestyle traveling to winter and summer encampments for hunting and fishing where they lived at least part of the year in wigwams, even into the early 1900s, as shown in the photo below. It is incongruous that a bride’s box would have suited that lifestyle or would have been needed for a woman’s personal possessions, especially back in the early 1800s when Mi’kmaq bride’s boxes were made.

A Mi’kmaq family circa 1900 (image: courtesy of Nova Scotia Museum, Reference Number: P113/ N-10,585)

Mi’kmaq women’s lives in the 1790s were probably not unlike the lives they lived 100 years earlier as described by a 17th century missionary in the Mi’kmaq homelands:

No more have I ever heard the women complain . . . because they themselves worked incessantly going to fetch wood for fires, building the wigwams, dressing the skins, and occupying themselves with severe labours, which are done only by the women. Each does her little duty quietly, peaceably, and without debate. (from Father Chrestien Le Clercq’s 1691 journal, as quoted in Hoffman, 1955)

That is not to say that Mi’kmaq women and men did not indulge in making and ornamenting beautiful utilitarian objects amidst their “incessant” work, as clearly they spent many hours creating elaborate designs on personal objects such as birchbark vessels and clothing ornamented with beadwork.

Mi’kmaq woman wearing a traditional beaded hood, circa 1860 (image: courtesy of Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, reference #: P113/ 34.46 (7773)/ N-11,252)

It is just that the notion that Mi’kmaq women were given large boxes to hold marriage trousseau possessions circa 1790-1825 seems less likely than that Mi’kmaq men made the boxes to sell or trade to the Germanic immigrants living among them in Lunenburg County.

Perhaps it is more appropriate to call the decorated bentwood boxes “Mi’kmaq-made” bride’s boxes, which leaves open the question of who was the receiving bride.

A Mi’kmaq couple in 1923 (image: courtesy of the Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, reference # P113/ 24.10.18 (5429)/ N-15,089)

Conclusions

Given that all of the known Mi’kmaq bride boxes came from a very narrow region of Nova Scotia, and that there are not many of the boxes in existence, it is likely that they were a small cottage industry of a few people or families who created them to sell locally to the Germanic immigrants who had settled in their homeland.

The form and construction of the bentwood boxes, their decorative patterns, and the techniques used to create the decoration all have long precedence in Mi’kmaq culture.

It is noteworthy that the name “Mi’kmaq brides box” has been passed down for several centuries as the attribution for these boxes despite the historical tendency of European colonizers to appropriate or erase Native cultural contributions, especially where there has been a blending of cultural influences, as is the case with these bride’s boxes.

As is brilliantly and thoroughly documented by the anthropologist Ruth B. Phillips (1998), Native American and First Nations’ artisans readily applied traditional indigenous materials, techniques, and skilled manual craftsmanship to creating objects for sale and trade that were tailored to European genres and tastes.

This Mi’kmaq bride’s box, even if only in name, is a prime example of such a “marriage” between Native and European traditions.

References

Bourque, B. J. (2001). Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Field, R. H. (1985). Spirit of Nova Scotia: Traditional Decorative Folk Art 1780-1930. Halifax: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

Hoffman, B. G. (1955). The Historical Ethnography of the Micmac of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Berkeley, CA: University of California.

Keno Auctions. (2012). The Peter Brams Collection of Important Woodlands Indian Art (auction catalog).

Lefko, L. C. (2004). German Decorated Boxes. Early American Life 35, no. 3: 22–26.

Philips, R. B. Tradiing Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900. (1988) Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Rand, Silas (1875). A First Reading Book in the Micmac Language. Nova Scotia Printing Company.

Speck, F. G. (1970). Penobscot Man. New York: Octagon Books.

Wallis, W. D. and Wallis, R.S.(1955). The Micmac Indians of Eastern Canada. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Whitehead, R. H. (1982). Micmac Quillwork. Halifax: Nova Scotia Museum.